Ash fell into the camp of giving exactly zero shits other than making his bride happy. And that made him happy. His one job apart from showing up for the ceremony was harrowing enough: make Lionel DuChamp show the fuck up for Rosemary.
He needed a plan, even if it meant he had to do it by force. Hell, he wasn’t even sure of the date. He was just trying to make it through Lent without thinking about his girl’s lady parts. Parts with a scent he could track for miles.
In the meantime, since he wasn’t getting the kind of action in the bedroom he really wanted, he did some digging into shapeshifting panthers in the southern Louisiana region.
He was stunned to find, when he went to his favorite commercial voodoo shop in the French Quarter, that this history was widely known. The shop owner, Lucy, was shocked that this was news to Ash.
“Oh yes,” said Lucy, a dear family friend who knew the wolfs’ secret. “The panthers go back many generations.”
“How did that happen?” Ash asked, leaning forward in his wingback chair in interest. He had been doing what he always did whenever he would visit Lucy—lounging around her reading room and sipping on a cup of her specially brewed yerba mate she always made whenever he showed up.
Lucy was unpacking a box of supplies while she explained. “An unscrupulous witch named Clarice tried to make Beauregard DuChamp suffer a mysterious and magical death. It did not end well.”
Ash sat up. “The DuChamps had enemies from the beginning of time, it seems.”
Lucy chortled as she unwrapped a bulk order of sage and divided it into portions to be weighed. “Of course. Someone hired her to do it. And every real practitioner knows if you take money to practice your powers, you’d better make sure the motive is pure. That spell was born of jealousy and greed. On top of that, old Clarice wasn’t a very good practitioner, because she got her spell all wrong. Instead of causing the bloated Beauregard to die by a wild animal attack on his nightly walk, he only got bit. Because the big cat was under Clarice’s spell, the black magic was passed on into the blood of the DuChamp family. Beauregard DuChamp himself was not a halfling or a shapeshifter, but his children ended up carrying the magical gene. They were doomed to a life of feline proclivities. They were prone to disappearing for hours every so often, whenever the urge to shapeshift came over them. Eventually, they learned to control the beast. Why do you think those rich folks send their daughters off to finishing school?”
Ash shrugged. “To learn how to use a shrimp fork?”
Lucy laughed. “That’s where they learn to tame the beast. Over the generations, they’ve developed the ability to only let the panther out at will. All except on the new moon. To this day, every new moon, they run off to the woods to hunt.”
Ash sat back in his chair gobsmacked. “How did I not know about any of this? And whatever happened to Clarice?”
She smiled and handed him a sack of crystals. “Because you never asked. Forget vampires and zombies. This city is shifter central. As for the practitioner, well my great-great-great-grandma Clarice went on to study harder, did her penance, and here we are.” She ended the story with a small flourish and a curtsey as Ash looked on, totally surprised.
“Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, it’s like I don’t even know you or the slightest thing about what goes on around this town right under my nose.”
Lucy, herself a high priestess, simply shrugged and said, “Well, the more you know. Here.” She handed him a small paper bag of crystals. “Crush those when you get home, and then just before the ceremony, burn them with some sage.” She dropped a small bundle of sage into the bag.
Ash laughed. “Am I supposed to smoke that too?”
Rolling her eyes, Lucy told him if he did smoke it to watch out for popcorn lung. “And just know this, do not expect this spell to make anybody do your bidding. It only makes people more open to suggestion. You still gotta be convincing.”
Ash took a whiff of the contents of the bag and gagged. “Rosemary’s not going to hate this aroma at her wedding. Not at all.”
He paid Lucy and drank down his tea before leaving. When he called Rosemary outside the shop to tell her he wanted to meet with her to discuss the plan to get her father to the wedding, she replied that she was feeling under the weather.
“Aw, baby, what’s the matter?”
She explained, “Sorry. ‘Under the weather’ is code for my time of the month.”
“Oh, okay,” he replied. “But I still want to see you, that doesn’t gross me out or anything.”
“I meant the other time of the month. The new moon. When I shapeshift and I have to go hunting with the family.”
Ash thought about this for a second. He wondered what she would look like as a panther. Would she recognize him? He would’ve loved to know all about her culture.
“Can I watch?”
Rosemary scoffed. “I’d rather you didn’t see me that way.”
“Baby. I’m going to marry you, I’m going to see it sooner or later. Might as well rip off that Band-Aid.”
The sigh on the other end of the phone reminded him of her honeyed breath against his skin when they were close together. He wished they were having this conversation face to face. “It’s just that it can be a little bit jarring the first time someone sees it. It’s pretty gruesome. I am a lady, after all. It feels like someone asking
